Various technologies have been developed that provide navigation-related and map-related services. For example, vehicle navigation systems can determine where a person or a vehicle is located and provide directions to travel to a desired destination. Other navigation-related services may provide other information to mobile users based on the location. Also, internet sites provide maps, directions for traveling to a desired destination from a specified starting point, and other map-related services.
In order to provide these and other map-related functions and features, navigation systems use geographic data. The geographic data may be in the form of one or more geographic databases that include data representing physical features in the geographic region. Sources or updates for the geographic data may be crowdsourced to a fleet of vehicles or other mobile devices for collection.
However, updates have high bandwidth requirements. In addition, some particular mobile devices may be better equipped to collect data than others. Challenges remain in optimizing geographic database updates in light of these considerations.